How To Protect Your Affiliate Links

One of the first things you must do as an Affiliate is to protect your Affiliate links so that you get paid for the products you recommend. Most affiliate programs use ClickBank to accept payments and the best thing about ClickBank is that it helps affiliates in being paid instantly as the sale is made through their site. All it requires is inserting your ClickBank ID into the sales links. But the main pitfall of this is because of the simplicity of this process - some scheming people just insert their ID instead of yours and not only purchase the product but get an instant discount also.

Unprotected links are the reason that most affiliates fail to make any money - they do the promotion, they drive the traffic to their sites and educate people about the product. But because they have their affiliate link exposed, they lose hundreds of $$$ in sales.

Here is a sample of how this happens. Let us say that your Affiliate Link is :

http://hop.clickbank.net?affiliate_id/member_id

As long as your Affiliate ID is in the link, you get the commissions. But what if someone just edits the link and changes it to their own id? So now, the link would look like :

http://hop.clickbank.net?not_your_id/member_id

And that's all it takes to lose your affiliate profits - and you won't even know about it.

This does not affect just the Affiliate Programs run by ClickBank. Let's say your affiliate link is something like this :

http://theprogramyouarerecommending.com/go.asp?affiliate_id

To go around such links, the Affiliate Thief can just delete the affiliate id or replace the id with his own, like :

http://theprogramyouarerecommending.com/go.asp

or

http://theprogramyouarerecommending.com/go.asp?his_affiliate_id

The only solution to this problem is to cloak your affiliate URL i.e. hide it so that your site visitors do not see the real link to which they are redirected. Now, there are many websites which offer this URL forwarding services - but I suggest that you do not use them. It's much better that you invest in a software that you can use on your own computer and which gives you much better control over the redirection. URL forwarding services are also pretty expensive if you need to promote more than one product. In contrast you need to invest in cloaking software only once and then can create unlimited pages from it.

If you want more info on software to protect your affiliate links, check out our free software, Affiliate Cash Buddy.